Conventional techniques for annotating, managing and searching content is generally limited to keyword searching and manually annotated meta tags. Frequently keyword searches yield large numbers of hits with only marginal actual relevance. The problem of locating information remains a daunting challenge.
Semantics-based technologies represent one promising avenue for addressing this challenge. Here, semantics refers to the explicit or derived (inferred) meaning provided by a fragment of information. At the document level, this meaning can be factual information like “J. Doe is the CEO of Acme Corp.” or a piece of information that is inferred from the context like “Acme is a company” or “This article is about mergers & acquisitions.” At the inter-document level, the semantic information gathered at the document level can be reused by the computer system to help derive information at a higher level. For example: “In the last month, there has been a trend showing negative criticism of Acme Corp.”
Some examples of semantic analysis techniques are disclosed in US 2011/0082863 (Chang et al.) and US 2010/0312743 (Thompson et al.). Some examples of semantic search engines are disclosed in US 2007/0124263 (Katariya et al.), US 2010/0036797 (Wong et al.), US 2011/0072021 (Lu et al.) and US 2010/0268702 (Wissner et al.). Some semantic annotation techniques are disclosed in US 2008/0221874 (Cao et al.). An indexing technique is disclosed in US 2009/0063550 (Van den Berg et al.). A text categorization method and apparatus is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,356,461 (Tremblay et al.). Various faceted search and display techniques are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,774,383 (Acevedo-Aviles et al.), U.S. Pat. No. 7,152,064 (Bourdoncle et al.), US 2010/0198837 (Wu et al.), US 2009/0106244 (Dash et al.), US 2007/0185836 (Handy-Bosma et al.), and US 2009/0234849 (Erera et al.). Each of these documents is hereby incorporated by reference.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.